


Lullaby Variation

by alby_mangroves



Series: Yuletide Stories [5]
Category: Crimson Peak (2015)
Genre: Blood, Coming of Age, F/M, First Kiss, First Time, Loss of Virginity, Murder Family, Pre-Movie(s), Sibling Incest, Symbolism, Victorian Attitudes, Vignettes, Yuletide 2015
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-24
Updated: 2015-12-24
Packaged: 2018-05-07 14:03:12
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,458
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5459069
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alby_mangroves/pseuds/alby_mangroves
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Abandoned to their own devices at Allerdale Hall, the Sharpe siblings forge a very special bond.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Lullaby Variation

**Author's Note:**

  * For [havisham](https://archiveofourown.org/users/havisham/gifts).



> Hats off to Violette-Royale and Nary for the wonderful beta assistance. Thank you so much ♥

**~ ⌘ ~**

Mother is still abed, though she was delivered of Lucille's baby brother six days ago.

 _A difficult labour,_ one servant says with a strange hunger Lucille does not understand.

 _Advancing years,_ whispers another. They’re all of the opinion that it's a miracle she managed a live child at all, let alone while enveloped in a shroud of fresh grief and widow's weeds.

Lucille tiptoes from her bed and steals into the nursery to see the babe, shadows creeping at her heels. The house is not silent even in the dead of night, creaks and groans reverberating through it, as familiar to Lucille as the breath in her own lungs. She can see it in the air, it’s so cold.

The bassinet is the very same one which she once inhabited, cream lace spilling over the sides and dripping to the floor.

Lucille has never seen so small a child before, but she has seen paintings of pink, satin draped cherubs blowing trumpets to the heavens and he is nothing like that. He is ugly. He has not a tuft of hair on his strange little head, and he is wrinkled like a tiny old man. Lucille stares at him.

The wet nurse is sleeping in the next room, but Lucille is a big girl of three-and-a-half and she knows how to be quiet.

His name is Thomas. Somebody will see fit to tell her soon, but Lucille has a good ear, the piano teacher says so.

Thomas snuffles in his sleep, one tiny fist jammed up to his mouth. When Lucille touches it, her finger is clasped in a strong, clammy grip. She shakes her hand but the baby has her tight and will not let go.

He whimpers when she bites him, just a nip of his dimpled little fist. Lucille watches with fascination as his face attempts to decide what emotion to have about it. Eventually he settles again. He still has her finger.

She pokes at his fat cheek and he turns, sucking her finger into his mouth. Lucille is too startled to react. He sucks strongly, then screws his face up; it is no milky teat.

Lucille bites him again, hard enough to leave tiny dents in his curled up hand, her heart pounding when he squalls. She could run back to her bed and let him cry. Nobody would suspect her of being out of her room at this time of night.

She hums a song instead - a lullaby Mother plays on the piano sometimes, then licks his little hand, kissing it until he quiets. He smells powdery and sweet like he has been bathed in pudding.

**~ ⌘ ~**

Thomas is in Lucille's bed when she wakes just after dawn, a warm bundle of small, pointy-elbowed boy nestled against her back. Lucille turns to look at him. He’s hidden in a mess of dark curls, face mashed into her pillow. His mouth is open and lax. He is deeply asleep.

He cries out when she pushes him out of her bed.

Thomas picks himself up off the floor and stands by the bed, dishevelled and pink from slumber. One half of his face wears creases matching Lucille’s pillow.

They stare at each other long enough that Lucille feels her ire receding at the wobble in his chin, the shock of his rude awakening still cloudy in his sleepy eyes. They are the same colour as hers, except that Thomas’ always look like pale puddles on the verge of spilling over. Lucille’s never do. There is too much black in them.

“What are you doing here, little pest,” she says.

Thomas stares and says nothing at all, until the house groans, carrying a sound like someone being tortured in the cellars all the way up to the nursery. Thomas visibly jumps, his knees knocking together.

Lucille looks past him and listens to the house breathe. “It’s just the east wind,” she says quietly. “Like Mother says.”

Mother has been away for so long. The house feels different without her. Sometimes it is as though it is only Lucille and Thomas in all the world. The mines are unstable so they do not go outside, and even if they did, there is nothing to do. The house, the nursery, is all they know.

“Please, Lucy,” Thomas whispers, the urgency of fright in his voice.

“You’re too big,” she says.

“I’m only five!”

“Oh, _only_ five when it suits you to be too small to be in trouble, and grown-up five when you’d not be babied.”

Thomas just stands pale and shivering beside her bed.

“Oh, all right,” she says, lifting the coverlets and letting Thomas scramble inside, a lick of cold following at his heels.

He buries his face in her pillows and kicks like a donkey to warm up his feet. Lucille clucks her tongue and slaps at him to be still.

They finally settle, but Lucille cannot go back to sleep. They will be roused soon enough, anyway. Dawn brightens outside, the night sky bleeding out into the colour of bruises. There is a sparrow on the window sill, but it flies off after a moment. There is nothing for it here, not a branch nor tree nor bush within eyeshot. Nothing grows on barren Sharpe land.

“There was someone in my room,” Thomas whispers. His little hand snakes out from beneath the covers and wraps around Lucille’s braid. “I woke up and there they were, looking at me.”

"Don't be stupid," Lucille says. "Nobody remembers we exist until we come down for breakfast." Not unless Mother is home, and sometimes not even then.

Still, Lucille is curious. “So what did you do?”

“I closed my eyes and pretended I didn’t see it,” Thomas says, sniffling into his sleeve, his little hand squeezing Lucille's braid. She rolls to her side and sinks her teeth into his fist. Thomas watches her from under the dark, curly cloud of his hair. She bites harder until he whimpers, then licks it to soothe the imprints of her teeth, humming their lullaby under her breath.

She pretends to be asleep when he returns that very same night, and all the nights after that, slipping ever so carefully into her bed.

**~ ⌘ ~**

Mother's chatelaine jangles with each step. _Ching, cha-ching. Ching, cha-ching._

Lucille's throat is sore from screaming and her thighs are wet, sticking as she walks between Mother and her maid. Mother’s grip on Lucille's arm is near bruising, the enormous rock of her ring digging in.

"Am I dying?" She must be.

"Nothing so simple as that," Mother says.

By the time they have made it to Lucille's room, there is a tub of hot water and another maid waiting. Lucille is herded into the tub, hands unpinning and untying and undressing her. She acts the doll.

The door between her and Thomas' rooms swings gently open, but nobody notices, bustling around her as they are. Lucille watches the sliver of darkness widen, and beyond it, Thomas' eyes are saucers in his little pale face, his hands clenched into fists.

 _It's all right,_ she wants to say. _I will not leave you._

Thomas looks down, and Lucille does too, to see what he is seeing to put that peculiar look upon his face.

Beneath the bundle of petticoats she is clutching in her hands, ribbons of blood swirl in the tub like ink as Mother scrubs her legs raw.

"You are a woman, now." Mother says, her mouth pressed in a line. "God help you."

Thomas’ eyes will not leave her. Lucille wonders what she must look like to him, half dressed with her plait askew.

Mother's skirts brush the door jamb like long black feathers as she leaves, abandoning Lucille to the maids.

"Do not worry your head about it, Miss, it's the natural order of things, you’ll get used to it soon enough," one of the maids says, pressing a wad of cloth between Lucille's legs and tucking her smallclothes around it. She keeps talking while she re-pins, re-ties, re-dresses her, but Lucille isn’t listening. The bone stays hurt. Her belly hurts like something inside her is eating its way out of her guts. Get used to it? How long will it go on before she is a bloodless corpse?

Lucille decides to ignore the maids and eventually they go away, sloshing the tub of filthy water between them.

Lucille glances up, but Thomas isn't there, the door between their rooms swung closed.

Mother leaves for Paris in the afternoon. The garnet on her finger catches scant sunlight as she is helped into her carriage. She had only been home for two weeks. The intervals between her visits to Allerdale Hall have become longer and longer.

Lucille stands at her window, watching the carriage recede in the distance. Where it had been parked, the wheel tracks are bleeding. It has been steadily snowing for several days. Naturally, the crimson stain seeps through.

Lucille stares at it, seeping crimson too. No wonder Mother hates her.

Thomas slips into her bed later than usual.

Lucille ignores him, eyes staring without focus. Outside, snow slowly builds up on her window sill, cocooning them in a blanket of white.

**~ ⌘ ~**

As time wears on, Thomas speaks less and less of ghosts in his room. He is far too busy perfecting the very fine art of ignoring anything that makes him uncomfortable. He is not, however, too busy to get himself into trouble and come to Lucille's bed to bawl about it.

"I just wanted to see what makes it work," he says wetly into Lucille's shoulder. His hands are clawed, held gingerly to his chest. He is bleeding, the skin over his knuckles split open.

“She had no right,” Lucille says, full of helpless rage at their governess. They both know this only happens when Mother is abroad and Mrs Murphy’s word is law. By the time Mother returns, Thomas’ wounds will be well healed. He is growing so fast now, nearly fourteen and a beanstalk, knobbly and perpetually hungry. “She had no right to touch you.”

“Well, I did break Father’s clock,” Thomas says.

“That’s hardly a reason to switch your hands bloody! Father’s been dead since before you were born and doesn’t need the stupid clock, but you won’t be able to hold your quill for a week!”

Lucille watches a drop of blood slide down between Thomas’ fingers. They’re as long and thin as they’ve always been, but Lucille notes the tendons, the meat of his palms, everything slowly refining from child to man. There will come a time when he will not stand for punishments such as these, but for now, they are both of them helpless.

Thomas has begun to cry again.

"Oh, stop it, you are making my nightgown all wet," Lucille says, and pinches his neck. His sobs get caught in her hair, and his breath stirs up a wave of goosebumps all over her body. Thomas' tears soak through to her skin, thin cotton and lace sticking to her breast and making it pebble.

Lucille's whole body sings with the closeness of his, suddenly overwhelmed in strange new ways.

She unlaces the ribbons at her throat and pulls open the front of her gown. It's wet. Uncomfortable. She pulls a little more, then a little more, until Thomas' nose is near brushing the peaked tip of her breast.

She closes her eyes when he presses his face in, his sharp little nose rooting along her nipple. It feels wonderful and dangerous. It feels like a haven right here in her bed.

Thomas’ breath fans over her dampened skin. "It hurts," he says, his lips brushing the teat as he speaks.

Lucille whispers _shhhh_ and _there, now_ , and pulls him closer, nudging her nipple into his mouth.

They fall asleep just like that, Thomas suckling at her tiny breast, with his poor hands cradled between their bodies, Lucille's hair spilled about them like a shroud.

**~ ⌘ ~**

The whole house turns out to help search for Mrs Murphy when she fails to return from her afternoon walk.

Later that night, the children watch the search party from Lucille's window, glowing yellow lanterns weaving to and fro like beastly eyes on the snowed-in moors, beyond the Sharpe land where the heather still grows.  

Mrs Murphy's remains emerge with the spring thaws. It takes several attempts to retrieve them from the bottom of a ravine.

Lucille is given Mrs Murphy’s watch as a keepsake. There is poetry in the fascination on Thomas’ face as he cracks it open to see its innards, worth even the ruin of Lucille's good winter boots.

**~ ⌘ ~**

Summer makes a miserly appearance at Allerdale Hall, barely skirting its spires and sliding away into the muddy chill of autumn before anyone notices.

By winter, they have grown practised at this new progression of protecting each other. Thomas slips into Lucille’s bed night after night, silent as a ghost, cold hands at her waist and pointy nose digging into her neck by way of greeting.

Lucille smiles and pinches him and pulls his hair until he is frantic, until they’re both breathless with giggles, until Thomas worms his way down to mouth at her breasts through her nightgown only to eventually drift off to sleep there, rooting around her teats like a pink, dark-curled piglet. Lucille pets his hair and holds his hand, all her smiles for him, indulgent.

When a black lacquered carriage rolls up the driveway to the house, they are both of them mystified for a moment - people usually leave Allerdale Hall, they don’t come to visit. It isn’t until a footman rushes to open the door and Mother’s garnet catches the light that they realise, Lucille swallowing around the lump in her throat and already mourning the loss of their thin slice of freedom.

**~ ⌘ ~**

Mother’s footman follows Lucille around with his eyes when Mother isn’t looking, which is not often, because Mother is always looking. It is very odd. Lucille has never had so much of Mother’s attention.

It all comes to a head when they forget themselves and come down to breakfast with hands entwined, Thomas’ nose in Lucille’s hair and his whispers tickling her ear. Mother’s face is hard as stone.

“Your Father left us with very few assets to see this family through. While you live under this roof, you will care for one of the most valuable as befits a Lady,” she says, locking Lucille in her room. Lucille shakes with rage, bloodless fists clenched in her gown.

So. At last it is clear. Mother may hate her and hide the both of them away out of sight at Allerdale Hall, but she will sell Lucille off to the highest bidder like a prize mare, and at her own convenience.

It snows heavily through the day as Lucille sits at her window, watching the virgin snow turn into red sleet as soon as it touches the ground. Mother's piano playing filters up through the floors, eerie and disjointed by the time it arrives at the nursery.

Thomas is subdued later, crawling into Lucille's bed with less than his usual puppylike fervour.

“What did she do?” Lucille asks, voice strangely cold for the fire burning inside her.

“ _She_ did nothing. The footman delivered the beating.”

“Let me see,” she says, dragging him under the coverlets and pulling his nightshirt up over his skinny belly.

“Careful,” Thomas hisses, turning on his stomach. It is dark in her room and darker still under the covers, but there is no mistaking the bruised welts on Thomas’ buttocks and thighs. Lucille sucks in a shocked breath.

She touches him, and he cringes a little, but doesn’t pull away. “Wait here,” Lucille whispers, and goes to the window. She sweeps the snow from the ledge as she forces it open, the freezing night air stinging her face. She uses a small towel to wind around a stalactite of ice, dislodging it from above her window, then brings it back to her bed to drip over Thomas’ skin. He shivers, but sighs with relief too. When her hands are numb, she throws the icicle in her washbasin and dives back into bed.

Thomas is shivering from the effects of the ice, so she turns him on his back and drapes herself over his body.

“She will separate us,” Lucille whispers, her hand tucked beneath Thomas’ nightshirt, warming her fingers with scales played over his ribs. He squirms at the cold, but does not push her away. 

“We won’t let her.”

Lucille rises up on her elbow and looks down at his dear, earnest face. “No. We won’t.”

Kissing Thomas feels as natural as breathing. His stern little mouth yields softly, opening for Lucille like a spring crocus.

“She means to marry me off and send me away.” Lucille says, the threat of tears prickling at the back of her throat.

“No,” Thomas says, “Why? Why would she do that?”

He is so sweetly naive. “She will find someone with money,” Lucille says. Thomas’ chin wobbles just like it did when he was a tiny child.

“What if I marry instead? Then you could stay.” Thomas’ face opens in wonder at the simplicity of this idea. “After Mother is gone and I am Baronet. I cannot leave Allerdale Hall then, and I will not marry you off, you can stay with me, Lucy. You can stay forever.”

“Yes,” she says, dreaming about it now. “You will marry and your wife will be rich and stupid and we will always be together.” It’s a beautiful thought. After Mother is gone.

She nibbles Thomas’ lips, bites a little harder with the pleasure of this wonderful dream, then soothes his mouth with licks of her tongue until Thomas is panting, his eyes tightly shut.

Thomas’ body has made a little tent under his nightshirt. Lucille has seen Thomas naked before, and has felt him poking into her leg when he toys with her breasts, but she has never seen what happens to him under there to cause the poking. Slowly, she lifts his shirt up over his belly again.

His little sac isn't soft and wrinkled, it is smooth and tight as a fist now, and above it, his prick has filled and hardened, curving up against his belly. It is marvellous and ugly and strange and utterly fascinating.

“Oh,” she says. Thomas is motionless beneath her, breathing like a racehorse as her fingers skate over it, testing the texture of his engorged flesh.

Lucille scoots down to see closer, then places a gentle kiss against his swollen tip. When she looks up, Thomas is straining to see, his brows drawn like he’s on the verge of a plea.

Watching his face, Lucille scrapes him with her teeth, then licks him there, testing his flavour. When she takes the tip into her mouth, Thomas’ eyes roll back in his head and his prick pulses against her tongue. Lucille feels an echo of that pulse deep between her legs and pulls up the hem of her gown to sit astride his thighs.

"What are you doing," Thomas whispers, alarmed, wide-eyed.

"Be quiet", Lucille whispers back, rocking sweetly against him until he is poking at her in that heavy, pulsing place. Pressing herself against him this way, sliding her parts over his feels like kissing, too.

She is tingling all the way down to her toes when the little head of his prick rubs against her just so. It has gotten moist and warm between them. 

She will have this too. She will have all of him for her very own in every way, and nobody will take him away from her, not even Mother; especially not Mother.

Lucille opens the neck of her gown, letting it fall from her shoulder, one hard-tipped breast peeking through the gape. Thomas' mouth falls open when he stares at it.

Lucille arches her back so his prick nudges at the opening between her legs, the asset Mother thinks is the sum of Lucille and her purpose as a Sharpe.

"Lucy, oh, _Lucy_ ," Thomas cries into her neck, clinging like a limpet when she takes him inside.

It hurts. It hurts so much, and he is too big, so much bigger than she thought when she was looking at him, but he is hers now, both of them forever marked by this moment. She pushes through the pain until she is well seated. Thomas' eyes are huge. Awed by the enormity of her blessing.

When he cries out, she covers his mouth with her hand and smothers his tremors with the warm drape of her body.

No force on this earth will keep them apart.

**~ Fin ~**


End file.
